Nairn MODERN BUILDINGS IN LONDON

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-912559-52-7
Verlag: Notting Hill Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'Without any doubt, London is one of the best cities in the world for modern architecture. But it is also one of the biggest cities in the world, and it does not make a display of its best things. A visitor looking for new buildings in the City and the West End might well be justified in turning away with a shudder. Yet delightful things may be waiting for him in Lewisham or St. Albans.' Ian Nairn, from the 'Foreword' to Modern Buildings in London. As one of the few architectural critics to eschew purely aesthetic modes of analysis, Ian Nairn's timeless books on modern urban cities have been hailed as some of the most significant writing about contemporary Britain, while also being praised as alternative 'guidebooks' for curious travellers. First published in 1964, Modern Buildings in London celebrates the character of buildings that were immediately recognisable as 'modern' in 1964, many of which were not the part of the well-known landscape of London but instead were gems that Nairn stumbled across. Written 'by a layman for laymen', Nairn's take on modern design includes classic buildings such as the Barbican, the former BBC Television Centre and the Penguin Pool at Regent's Park Zoo as well as schools, old timber yards, ambulance stations, car parks and even care homes.

Ian Nairn (1930-1983) was a British architectural critic and topographer who coined the term 'subtopia' for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. In the 1960s he contributed to the volumes on Surrey and Sussex in Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series and published a number of his own books, including Nairn's Paris and Nairn's Towns, both published by Notting Hill Editions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nairn, Ian

Leseproben

1

– City of London –

1 Bucklersbury House and Temple Court, 3 Queen Victoria Street

Campbell Jones & Sons 1954–61

A few yards away from the Mansion House, the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange: a good place to start. This mass of building has a lot of storeys, a lot of windows, freedom from pointlessly applied period detail, freedom from obvious gracelessness, freedom from aesthetic megalomania. It has no virtues and no vices: it is the null point of architecture, the base line for the judgments in the rest of the book. This is where architecture begins.

2 English, Scottish and Australian Bank, 55 Gracechurch Street

Playne & Lacey and Partners 1958–60

Near the Monument; a decent, dignified, carefully furnished office building. Not outstanding, but perhaps worth a special visit to understand the difference between good design and cliché-mongering, which is exemplified in pre-war modernistic terms on its right, and in post-war terms (1962) on its left. The difference in the way that abstract mosaics are used in the two recent buildings is very telling. No. 55 has a pattern deftly fitted on to the roof of the recessed balcony on the eighth floor; the Midland Bank next door has a garish design sprayed high up all over the stairwell. Quality will always tell, whatever the style.

3 Malvern House and Zidpark, Upper Thames Street

C. E. Wilford & Son 1961

A wry little architectural parable here. The office block is ordinary, and the various touches intended to humanize it seem gauche and inorganic. But the Zidpark behind, because it was designed for cars and not humans, is an unaffected and straightforward job. Completely automatic, with the cars moved vertically on lifts and horizontally on rollers. The building is just an open-sided grid with bolted steel floors and vertical steel rods to stop you feeling nervous about the family saloon. No walls, no windows. The car-fronts make their own pattern. The unhappy and unnecessary fins attached to these rods were at the request of the planning authority who wanted it to have a ‘solid appearance’ at a distance. It used to look very well seen from Bankside, across the river. Now the view is hidden by a new building, but this has the best of reasons for being there, for it is the first new riverside pub in London since the war.

4 Rebuilding east of St. Paul’s

Various hands, 1954 onwards

If by whim or temperament you want to find somewhere to say: ‘Oh dear, the English!’ then this is it. Every change has been rung on timidity, compromise and incompetence. There is the grinding neo-Georgian horror of the Bank of London & South America, 40 Queen Victoria Street, EC4, one of the deadest buildings in the whole of London. There is the cautious equivocation of Gateway House, 1 Watling Street, EC4, next to it, which is not too bad, especially in the way it incorporates a public footpath underneath. There is a good deal of unremarkable packing-case stuff; and there is the extraordinary Financial Times building (Bracken House, 10 Cannon Street, EC4) by Sir Albert Richardson. Unlike all the others, this is a serious and sincere building; a real attempt to adapt and extend eighteenth-century language to modern conditions. Brown brick and red sandstone make weird bedfellows for the City, and the result seems clumsy and heavy; but at least you feel it was designed by a human being for human beings. Oddly enough it would be more at home in Milan than in London, for the style is more or less what the followers of Neo-Liberty are trying to do in Italy.

5 The Times, Printing House Square, Queen Victoria Street

Richard Llewellyn, Davies & Weeks; Executive Architects, Ellis, Clarke & Gallannaugh 1961–63

A new courtyard, open to Queen Victoria Street, which was built around the original building so that it could be used until the last minute. (It was finally demolished at the end of 1962.) The replacement is delicately planned and punchy enough in its volumes, which are built up with split-pitched roofs that the architects have used elsewhere (e.g. in their new village at Rushbrooke in Suffolk). But the surfaces have become too polite, even for The Times. Westmorland slate and cool mosaic have an impassivity which is not going to take on a bloom as the London bricks do. The old building with its famous pediment understood this better; if it had been preserved the new would have formed the perfect complement to it, respectful but not servile. As it is, the architectural head of steam is not strong enough.

6 Multi-Storey Car Park, Aldersgate Street

Oscar Garry & Partners 1961

This is the parable of the Zidpark continued north of St. Paul’s. This building uses concrete aggregate walls as unselfconsciously as the other uses steel. It is in fact the basis of a friendly and adaptable office block, except that the materials might be considered by clients and planners alike as somehow ‘not good enough’. But then Art stepped in, with the hideous and pointless profiling of the mullions, and added further complications in the spandrels. This is a very decent building gone wrong by having too much time spent on it. Yet, ironically, town centres all over the country are being ruined by having not enough time spent on them.

7 Golden Lane Housing, Finsbury

Chamberlin, Powell & Bon 1955–62

I suppose I have made twenty visits to this compelling bit of modern London, over the years. Beginning with surprise and delight, sliding slowly into disillusion with the grime and the stained surfaces, emerging again now with such a powerful sense of place that a few blotched concrete balconies can be taken in their stride.

Golden Lane was the result of a competition in which all three architects sent in entries. They were then lecturing at the Kingston School of Art and agreed to team up if one of the entries won. Powell’s did, and formed the basis of the present neighbourhood, but with repeated alterations and extensions. The density here is very high (200 persons per acre) and is organized in tight courts employing constant changes of level of a few feet to create a sequence of individual comprehensible spaces. Most of the housing is in six-storey blocks made up of maisonettes strongly defined by floors and crosswalls. These are the source of the stained balconies and stairwells, which are indeed very depressing.

There is one tall slab, of sixteen storeys, which has much crisper detail and a remarkable jeu d’esprit on top, rather like a concrete aeroplane. This was frankly done for fun, and even if it does not succeed was still a marvellous thing to do, in this most humourless of all times. The block on Golden Lane was built last and foreshadows the extension which faces Goswell Road and was finished in 1962. This is long and curved, with a heavy cornice using the repeated segmental curves which have become a fashion in Britain in the last few years – e.g. in Sir Basil Spence’s university buildings at Brighton. Underneath it the maisonettes are arranged tangentially to the curve, with projecting two-storey bow windows which change shape for geometrical reasons with each unit. The result is so complex that it defies description, and unlike most such attempts it does manage to achieve organic complexity, so that you feel that the result is right even if your intellect can’t see why. The detail is mannered, but in the right way – i.e. you can regard it with affection, like a funny friend, rather than feeling invaded by it. The landscape and townscape ideas throughout are first rate, and will need several more years before they can be properly seen.

8 Route 11

Various architects, co-ordinated by Henryk Blachnicki of the City of London Planning Office, 1960 onwards

Until the whole scheme is finished, with its continuous first floor pedestrian deck, a proper assessment of Route 11, or South Barbican, is impossible. It is the first area in Central London for which a large-scale comprehensive plan has been worked out, and will link up eventually with Chamberlin Powell & Bon’s scheme for the main part of the Barbican which has just begun. Both became possible because the area was bombed flat in the war.

The scheme consists of eighteen-storey slabs raised on a podium – three on one side of Route 11, two on the other. All use standard grid or curtain walling laid down by the City’s planning office; individual architects can vary details such as the roof treatment and the colour of the spandrel panels. In practice there is a surprising variation in quality. Lee House, the furthest west, is a good deal better than the others. The architects here were B. Gold & Partners, Consultant A. J. Shickle. This is the type of control practised by many of the eighteenth-century estates, and it is worth employing more often, because it does give the chance for some kind of balance between restriction and freedom.

The effect of this grand axis is still impossible to judge. The slabs look so much lighter than masonry buildings of the same size that they seem unsubstantial. In some lights this is mysterious and faery, in others – evening sunlight, for example, with a maximum of reflected light – it simply looks shallow. Also some of the details, such as...